Snow arrived just in time on the morning of December 5 to coat the Meadows and serve as the perfect backdrop for the Loomis Chaffee minibus being decorated by students in Community Engagement that afternoon. The bus will be part of the Torchlight Parade in Windsor on Saturday evening, December 7. 

Before bedecking the bus, the students were stationed in the Community Engagement room, which already had been decorated, where they helped to receive gifts from various faculty, staff, and students who purchased them for the Project Santa and Holiday Help programs for Windsor families and individuals in need.  

“Holidays are a time of giving,” said senior Maren Forrest, the president of the Pelican Service Organization, as students carried and tested lights outside to adorn the bus. “I don’t think of the holidays as something just for me and my family but as an opportunity to give to people who don’t have the resources.” She had shopped for Christmas pajamas for two children, saying she wanted them to “have something that reminds them of the spirit” of the holidays. 

The Torchlight Parade of vehicles, ranging from fire trucks to the Loomis bus, concludes an evening in town that starts with a tree lighting and caroling on the Windsor Town Green.  

Wednesday’s flurry of activity marked just one moment in a series of Loomis Chaffee events and projects aiming to brighten the lives of those in need at the holidays. Students in Community Engagement this fall made holiday cards for Windsor’s Weekend Wheels program, which sends food home every weekend with kids whose families are experiencing food insecurity.  

And more activities are in store during the week of December 8. 

On Wednesday, December 11, the Loomis Chaffee Parents Association (LCPA) will assemble goody bags in the Community Engagement room for kids in Hartford through the Hands on Hartford backpack program, which, like the Windsor program, sends backpacks of food home for families in need. The Loomis Chaffee Chamber Singers will perform.  

And on the night of Friday, December 13, the Pelican Service Organization will hold its Holiday Service Festival from 8:30-10:30 p.m. in the Scanlon Campus Center. Gingerbread houses will be decorated, for donation to area senior centers and residences, and other clubs on campus will be offering ways to serve their neighbors in need, ranging from making blankets for animals in shelters to assembling hygiene kits for women in shelters, said Director of Community Engagement Heather Henderson. That night also is the A Cappelicans Winter Concert at 8 p.m. in the chapel.